I am originally from Africa (Egypt) and got to see the impact of the large scale fires on informal settlements (shanty towns) and how this impacts the lives of thousands of people in a blink of an eye. IRIS-Fire project captured my attention once I finished my MSc in fire safety science and thought this is where I should be next.
The project is to build the base of an easy to use tool by the stake holders related to the fire safety in informal settlements around the globe. The project will help to create a method to exchange knowledge of the fire scientists at the University of Edinburgh about Informal Settlements fires in a computational tool that would be easy to use to create both parametric studies and risk maps. These risk maps and parametric studies will help developed countries around the globe to improve the resilience of informal settlements to fires. The project is a collaboration between my group at the university of Edinburgh where we created a lot of experimental data and the fire modelling group at the National Institute of Standards (NIST).Where NIST is the developer of the most used/developed free Computational Fluid Dynamics Code (CFD) namely Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS). So we simply want to use our experimental data base to validate the FDS model so everyone can just use it to understand the fire risks.
Adding value to Scotland and beyond
Urbanization is one of the most important challenges that is faced by humanity in the 21st century. A big portion of this global urbanization is happening in the global south (sub-Saharan and below) where Africa is the fastest urbanizing continent on earth with an average 7% increase in population between 1990-2015, with increasing in the population within the urban clusters by around 500 million. The majority of new urban districts are informal settlements constructed ad-hoc using available materials, with no formal space planning and with few explicit fire safety measures.
The proposed research aims to develop new methods and tools required to evaluate and model fire risks within informal settlements of the Western Cape in South Africa, so that appropriate and cost-effective solutions and strategies can be suggested to improve the resilience of South African informal settlement communities against large-scale fires. This knowledge will then be applied to other countries where our projects covers e.g. Brazil, Kenya, Nigeria and Lebanon.
Advice for future grant recipients
The only advice I could give to an applicant just now, it is important to make sure that your project will have a real impact. The RSE is very interested in projects impacting more people especially in developed countries. There is a lot of research still needed in Low and Middle (L/M) income countries and small steps/projects like those funded by the RSE could really be the base of great future projects and help in saving lives and enhancing people’s life quality.
What’s next?
After this project I will start a Post-Doc position to help spreading the knowledge I developed during my PhD and help in delivering easy tools for developed countries to build better understanding for fire safety.
